temporal poetry

A look back at 'Jacket' in 1999

1999 was a great year for Jacket poets, even if it was a bit of a wild year outside. Some sectors speculated that the Y2K bug would spell the end of the Internet — and the end of Jacket by default — but more than that, the last year of the millennium was a time for reflection. It evoked a sense of nostalgia and a near-obligatory need to look back at the figurative footsteps in the sand. Jacket published issues 6–9 that year (January, April, July, and October), so why not take a moment to look back at the poets who were likewise looking back?

1999 was a great year for Jacket poets, even if it was a bit of a wild year outside. Some sectors speculated that the Y2K bug would spell the end of the Internet — and the end of Jacket by default — but more than that, the last year of the millennium was a time for reflection. It evoked a sense of nostalgia and a near-obligatory need to look back at the figurative footsteps in the sand.

Recently in Jacket2

Carla Harryman’s Artifact of Hope (Kenning Editions, 2017) is a creative/critical encounter with the work of the German philosopher Ernst Bloch. Through a variety of forms — daydreams, letters, meditations, quotations, classroom assignments, and even a conference paper — she engages with Bloch’s key concept of “hope.” These too are transpositions, insofar as they expand the meaning of translation beyond issues of linguistic or cultural equivalence.